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Burmese women refugees at Prosperity Candle’s studio in Easthampton, MA (credit: Prosperity Candle)
Too many of today’s news stories feature ruthless businessmen crumbling to greed and selfishness. Is there any hope out there for goodwill to survive? Luckily, there might be. A B-Corporation is a business with an explicit mission to benefit the greater good for humanity or the environment, as well as make a profit.
In Easthampton, Massachusetts, Prosperity Candle is a pristine example of a small B-Corp doing everything it can to change the world. Under the leadership of Ted Barber, Prosperity Candle trains women in candle-making and employs them at living wages after they have been relocated to the U.S. from overseas refugee camps.
Prosperity Candle has also helped train more than 100 Iraqi women – mostly war widows – in candle-making and entrepreneurship, giving them the ability to start their own thriving businesses. Their sister non-profit, Prosperity Catalyst, received funding from the U.S. State Department to expand the program to include 600 Iraqi widows. Prosperity Candle’s reach has found its way to Haiti, as well. They have given 12 women from domestic violence shelters in Northern Haiti the skills to start their own cooperative.
Sealing the Cracks
Refugee women are typically given a year of support from federal and state programs, during which time they are expected to find work and pay all of their own expenses. They often find themselves in minimum wage, temporary positions, made explicitly harder with language barriers. Facing many obstacles with a minimal a safety net, it’s very easy for these women to fall through the cracks.
Back in 2010, Prosperity Candle asked a group of refugee women what they truly need in terms of support. They were simple and clear: living wages, a steady income, opportunities to take ESL classes, flexible hours, a harassment-free workplace, and resources to understand the laws of their new home. Ted did not find these needs out of reach, and vowed to provide them double the minimum wage, transportation, and flexible schedules – among other supports. He wants his employees to be safe and treated with respect, and to help them get back on their feet not only so that they can survive, but also thrive.
“We’re very explicit,” Ted says. “We’re here to help women thrive. Minimum wage doesn’t even cover the bare necessities.”
Iraqi women learning candle-making in Baghdad (credit: Heber Vega)
B-Smart About the Bottom Line
Prosperity Candle was recently added to the top ten percent of B-Corps in the world for their size. Ted’s long-term goal is rather simple: to make a difference. He wants investors to see they are providing amazing opportunities not only to women who desperately need it, but for a healthy financial environment. He wants the organization to scale gradually and sustainably so that more lives can be impacted without growing so rapidly they fizzle out.
“I want to grow this business in a very specific way,” he says. “It’s not just employing women refugees here in the Pioneer Valley, but actually making them profit-sharing partners. I’m always exploring how Prosperity Candle can be a vehicle for greater impact.”
Personally, Ted’s goal is to merge his past experience in international trade and economic development with his present life dedicated to a creating a sustainable social enterprise that helps women and families lift themselves out of poverty.
B-Corps embody the philosophy of positive capitalism, which is when a business moves forward, but also makes it possible for others to move forward, too. The Dalai Lama says your goal should be to get on your feet, and then help others get on their feet. Like the ripples from a pebble thrown into a pond, the act of goodwill started by positive capitalism can start a chain reaction.
Ted admires any organization that has gone through the rigorous requirements to become a B-Corp, and considers it to be one of the best measures available for assessing an organization’s commitment to social and environmental sustainability. Even though there’s only about 1,500 B-Corps in the world, it’s an extremely active community.
“I support businesses that take on the challenges of doing things the right way, that care as much about the common good as their own personal success. That is what the B-Corp movement is all about,” he says.
Haitian women learning candle-making in Cap-Hatien (credit: Prosperity Candle)
“The global economy is like a roof over all of us. But it depends on individual pillars for support. First take care of yourself financially. Then, step-by-step, stand on your own feet in order to help others.”
When asked if he could give any advice to his younger self, or to an entrepreneur looking to make the same sort of lifestyle transition into B-Corps like he did, Ted laughed and said, “I feel like there’s a talk in me that wants to come out… with any start up – whether it’s nonprofit, for-profit, social enterprise or tech – you’re going to have more people tell you why it won’t work than why it can. You have to filter out an onslaught of nay-sayers because they’re there in spades. Well-meaning and genuinely intending to help, but more inclined to punch holes than be supportive. This is my third venture, and I’m beginning to see a pattern. My advice is to seek out people who love your passion, regardless of whether they think your idea is crazy.”
Prosperity Candle truly embodies the words of the Dalai Lama. Ted Barber got on his feet, and now is spending the rest of his life helping others join him. And who knows? Maybe we’ll see him on a TED Talk in the future. Until then, Prosperity Candle will continue to be a model for other entrepreneurs and businesses interested in making a difference and joining the B-Corp movement.
Learn more about Prosperity Candle’s mission and initiatives at prosperitycandle.com.
The audiobook for A Force for Good: The Dalai Lama’s Vision for Our World is available for pre-order. The 6-disc set and digital download will be available on June 23, 2015. Listen to an excerpt from the audiobook here.
It’s no secret that I’m not thrilled with the environment of today’s business schools and management training. The business world wants leaders, but the education only gives their students the skills to be workers. A recent Bloomberg study about the skills gap that executives are finding in corporations says the four areas that are really missing in business education are:
Problem Solving
Decision Making
Leadership Skills
Communication Skills
These four skills are missing pieces that have been sighted since 2001 when I first started reading Josh Bersin and Company’s annual report to the Learning Development world. Some companies are highly engaged with the personal development of their employees and actually provide them with formal training to make up for the slack in their education. They put them in situations that cause them to cultivate their problem solving and decision making skills, and have a mentor/coach follow up with them. This open stream of communication helps organizations view their new employees not as workers, but as their leaders of tomorrow.
A company I worked with, ICANN, was a 13 year-old start up with a very small staff responsible for the resilience, safety, and security of the internet. The staff was filled with very bright and skilled personnel, but never had any formal training. I wanted them to be well-rounded, adaptable individuals, but to get there these four skills have to be a required part of the performance management process. If employees are responsible for problem solving and decision making but it isn’t part of their performance management process, they’re (understandably) just going to ignore it or find a way around it.
From my own experience, I have found the case study method to be the most effective. My online course, Thriving on Change: The Evolving Leader’s Toolkit, uses three pillars – mindful awareness, focused attention and intentional relaxation, and cultivating goodwill – as major skills areas that are required for employees to develop a foundation that they can grow from. These skills allow them to be better equipped to handle any challenges and tough judgments that arise.
Thriving On Change teaches you to not only listen to other people, direct reports, or peers, but to really hear what they’re saying. Your coworkers’ views and words are just as relevant to a collaborative environment as yours. But to hear them properly you have to be able to put aside your views, opinions, and biases first. You have to be able to bring a kind of neutrality and objectivity to the decision making process.
A lot of conflict arises due to the lack of communication, leadership, and decisive skills, which is where mindfulness and goodwill comes in. If you’re going to generate goodwill in your workplace and life, you have to be skilled at conflict resolution. Mindfulness is one thing, but you have to be able to stand the heat when people have differences of opinion and strong negative emotions. Mindfulness goes out the door if you don’t also have the confidence to be able to skillfully have that conversation.
Preview the free Introductory Module from Thriving on Changehere.
Download Elad’s free ebook, Learn to Dance on Jellohere.
Elad Levinson, head lecturer for the Praxis You course Thriving on Change, has over 45 years of experience as a leadership coach and organizational consultant. He’s currently the Senior Organization Effectiveness Consultant at 4128Associates.
Elad has been a senior organization development and learning and development professional at Agilent, Stanford University, ICANN and several start-ups. He was the first to apply the stress theory to business and leadership at many of these organizations.
The following is an excerpt of Elad Levinson’s interview with Leadership Development News.It’s no secret that the “softer” personality traits aren’t as valued in organizations. Empathy, self-reflection, and goodwill take the backseat to efficiency, results, and profits. What would you say if I told you that fostering the former skills would actually improve the latter?
Jane Dutton, one of the founders of the Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship and University of Michigan Roth School of Business, has been studying and researching compassion in the workplace. Her research shows that when you train in mindfulness, it has an immediate impact on the quality of your relationships with your colleagues.
Mindfulness and compassion in the workplace happens in three ways:
Responsibility
You take more responsibility for your own reactions to situations. Instead of being unaware of the impact you have on the people around you – whether it be the team you manage, the project you’re a part of, or even in your personal life outside of work – you begin to step back and observe. Once you are able to view yourself from a semi-objective standpoint, you will find that your actions, positive or negative, may have been really influencing outcomes.
Listening
Your listening skills will be immediately impacted. When you are mindful, you tend to be able to put aside your internal reactions to things and really listen to someone and what they are experiencing. As a result, you will improve in being able to include other people and their experiences with the problems you’re trying to solve, which will make not only you, but your team, happier and more efficient.
Warmth
You just might become warmer. You become more interested in others. There is a sense of concern that the people around you might translate as, “I’m with you, not against you. I’m here for you and interested in your growth and development.”
What people like Jane Dutton and myself are trying to say is that there is room for compassion in the workplace. Work should not be a place you have to completely turn yourself off. Practicing mindfulness and compassion in the workplace can start with you; give it some time and you just might notice your colder co-workers warming up to you, and your workplace become a more enjoyable place.
Preview the free Introductory Module from Thriving on Changehere.
Something to ponder: when people become more mindful, do they also tend to become more relational, more aware of other people? And if so, does it also move them to action? Elad Levinson, instructor for our first Praxis You course, Thriving on Change, spoke with Mirabai Bush about her experience with the interdependence between mindful awareness and cultivating goodwill.“I think that mindfulness is very important in cultivating goodwill toward others. In my experience, when I work mindfully with an intention toward compassion, for instance, I notice that I am working better with others. The more you practice, or the deeper you go, the more you tend to develop awareness of how you can make change to relieve the suffering of others.
Mindfulness gives you the space to cultivate calmness and clarity, which can allow you to become quiet enough to be present for another person–to really listen to them and be conscious of their emotions. Of course, practicing mindfulness doesn’t, in and of itself, always provide such results. Some people begin to practice mindfulness and other meditations and would prefer to sit in a cave, so to speak. Just stay inward. And there are long traditions of that in all the religious and spiritual traditions: contemplation doesn’t have to focus on relationships.
We really need to do complementary compassion practices to cultivate goodwill. When I consult with organizations dealing with difficult leadership transitions or mergers, I introduce a practice called Just Like Me. Here’s how it works: you look at another person and remember, call to mind, all the ways in which they are ”˜just like me.’ Participants silently repeat phrases like, ”˜You are another human being, with thoughts and emotions, just like me, and you have been through very difficult things in your life, and you want to be a good person, just like me.’ At the end, you send goodwill and kindness to the other person.
Keep in mind that we also need to cultivate compassion, understanding, and care for ourselves. Then an awareness of the ways in which others are just like me really begins to resonate. We have more of a predisposition, or an inclination, to treat each other with respect and dignity.”
Sign up for More Than Sound’s free newsletter to learn how and when to register for my Praxis You course, Thriving on Change. Email mike@morethansound.net to sign up.
Take a Survey
To help us develop useful, practical courses for you, please take a few moments to complete a very short survey. As a thank you, we’ll give you free access to the introductory module of our first course, Thriving on Change. Be sure to provide your email address when you’re done with the survey.
“When I began introducing mindfulness methods to co-workers or clients, the most noticeable shift was that people became more present with difficulty. They didn’t repress it or push it away. They were better able to say, “Okay, here’s a difficult situation. What are our options? What are the possibilities? What can we do with it?” I began to see a calmness and acceptance in difficult moments.
People also started to accept change with more ease. As you may know, when we practice mindfulness, we learn to see that everything is changing all the time. We watch our mind and our body. We notice thoughts and physical sensations rise and fall away. Sensations are changing. Ideas are changing. We become much more comfortable with change.
When I first started working with Google, I was intrigued by a real-time projection of what people were Googling. The whole wall was a projection of all these questions, phrases and fragments going up the wall, and then disappearing. I thought, “This is the global mind at work.” Just the way you watch your own mind in meditation, you’re getting to watch what the global mind is thinking and letting go of.
Back to coping with change. When I worked with a large chemical company in the mid-”˜90s, there was always a possibility they were going to be bought by somebody else. It was that period of mergers and acquisitions. The employees were always really worried about job security. I would focus our mindfulness practice retreats on dealing with change.
We discovered that the more comfortable we become with change, the more we can just be with whatever arises. Including a job loss. And that’s not to minimize that such a change could cause suffering. But we’d be able to be there with that suffering. That presence and awareness was huge in terms of developing leaders.”
Sign up for More Than Sound’s free newsletter to learn how and when to register for my Praxis You course, Thriving on Change. Email mike@morethansound.net to sign up.
Take a Survey
To help us develop useful, practical courses for you, please take a few moments to complete a very short survey. As a thank you, we’ll give you free access to module one of our first course, Thriving on Change. Be sure to provide your email address when you’re done with the survey.
Here’s the bad news: we’re a stressed out nation. Here’s the worse news: we’re not good at managing stress.
According to research findings about stress in America, a majority of respondents surf the web or tune out in front of the TV to relieve anxiety. Too much time tethered to technology is taking a toll on our collective well being.
Another study at the University of Gothenburg found that those who constantly use a computer or their mobile phone can develop stress, sleeping disorders and depression. The results also showed a correlation between stress and always being available on the phone.
There’s a recent study that was published by colleagues of mine at Harvard that involved a technique we call “experience sampling“, where people are actually using smart phones, the very technology that we’re discussing. They’re randomly beeped at during different time in their daily life, and they’re simply asked what they’re doing right now, and whether their mind is focused on what they’re doing.
It turns out that in a very large sample of adult Americans, 47% of the time people were mind wandering. That is, during waking periods, 47% of the time, people were not actually attending to what they were supposed to be attending to. It’s quite remarkable. This is really one of several indicators that our culture is suffering from attention deficit disorder.
A number of scientists have now marshaled very compelling evidence to indicate that we can learn to focus our attention better. We can be more skillful at not being hijacked by distractions. We may notice them, but there’s a big difference between noticing that something may be occurring, being aware of it, and being hijacked by it, being pulled away from one’s central focus.
There is now quite a bit of evidence to indicate that the circuits in the brain that play a role in regulating our attention, and very rigorous behavioral measures of attention, change in response to mindfulness meditation practice. One of the central indices of that change is our capacity to not be hijacked by distracting events in our environment, particularly distracting emotional signals, which often pull us away from our task at hand.
Attention Regulates Emotion
When you’re upset, you often have no idea how to extricate yourself from that mindset. You feel trapped because it’s difficult to use emotion to change emotion.
The more we strengthen our circuitry for concentration, the easier it becomes to let go of distressing emotions. Strengthening attention helps you let go of stressful circumstances because the brain economizes our circuits. Being compelled to pay attention to your emotions is the opposite of being able to choose where you put your attention. If you’re counting your breath, you choose to focus on the breath and let go of all other distraction. The circuits that strengthen attention also allow you to let go of the hijack.
Alternatives to Tech Distractions
Here are some easy-to-follow guided exercises to use when you’re feeling stressed. Try practicing them instead of surfing the web and staring at TV to decompress.
Exciting, compelling, and grounded in new research on meditation, this is a rare audiobook with powerful insights that can change us at the deepest level.
